Hey all,

So I’ve decided to build a little blogging platform to integrate into an existing Phoenix application that I’ve built. For now the Phoenix app is just a little web server serving a single page app with react and a postgres database on the backend to collect some contact information from users. Not much to it.

To drive traffic to the site I want to add some blog functionality at the Site Unavailable endpoint. Originally I was going to use something like Ghost to save time, but decided to get more hands on. Of the existing Elixir blogging solutions my favorite is Nabo, but after digging through the source code I’ve decided to roll my own and open source the solution.

Ultimately my goal is to be able to iterate this code over several sites that I’m building, all of which will have some kind of content/blogging component. Some of these might be entirely focused on serving written content. These will likely all be Elixir apps that depend on Phoenix for web service in some way.

My options as I see them are:

• Write a non-OTP blogging kernel library that has modules for fundamental interactions for Article, Category, Tag, Comment, etc, and all the good stuff that could then be included/imported/used inside of any elixir/Phoenix platform. I guess it would have to make some presumptions about what the corresponding repository tables would look like, probably including some generators or something of the like. However the goal would be to abstract all of the common business logic surrounding writing blogs that’s a pain in the ass to write over and over again.

• Write a library as an OTP application that does fundamentally the same thing, but that is intended from the outset to be an OTP application could then just be hooked into any existing Elixir/OTP application. I guess this would behave more as a standalone solution, and could probably just even be dependent on Phoenix. It seems like this would probably be less flexible than writing a set of tools that are fundamentally independent of how/where they’re being implemented, but would probably be easier than integrating them into an independent Phoenix app every time I want to deploy a new blog, which is probably what I’d end up doing.

This may all be a bit fuzzy as I’m presenting it from 10,000 ft, and I understand a lot of this is a matter of taste, but I thought it might be useful to solicit some opinions here before I commit to one approach or another. Hopefully this is something that will become useful to the community at large, so it seemed to make sense to open this question up to the community from the outset.

Do either of these seem more useful/accessible to you? Is there anything in particular you’d like to see come out of the Elixir community in terms of libraries to support publishing content?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

~ Mike Zazaian